#E75 Frosh/Soph - First Impressions
The tenth annual Elite 75 Showcase – Frosh/Soph Edition lived up to its hype, in more ways than one.
Over the course of the last decade, the event has annually attracted the very best underclassmen in New England and been a who’s who of the region’s future stars.
While the perception of many is typically based on comparing the talent in attendance against each other, for NERR, the initial comparison is more holistic as our first impression is typically more about how the collective talent measures up against years past.
Admittedly, there have been years when that first impression can be underwhelming…but this was not one of those years.
Let’s begin first in 2020. This is a class that has come a long, long way in the last year. A year ago, the unprecedented parity of the group was enough to motivate us to abandon typical rankings in favor of a top 25 watch list. Since then though a combination of factors have changed things fairly dramatically. First, a select few of those previously mentioned 25 have come on especially strong. Second, other prospects have begun to emerge in a major way. Third, the region has experienced our typical boost of new talent in the prep ranks. Put it all together and this suddenly looks like a class with very impressive depth and plenty of talent to go around.
In 2021, there is more star power than we saw at this point last year in the freshmen class. In fact, a couple of guys clearly have national caliber talent. Beyond that though, it is a group that is again characterized by the same parity we saw at this point last year in 2020, but ultimately that’s the fun part, because they are bound to evolve in the same way, with certain prospects emerging faster than others, new prospects starting to make a name for themselves, and the promise of more talent set to arrive in the future thanks to our prep programs.
The process of sorting through all of the talent that was under one roof can’t be done in just one day. With evaluators and cameras on all 8 courts there is a total of 32 hours of footage and 50 pages of notes to sort through.
What makes that process is especially daunting this year was the sheer level of participation in this year’s event, but ultimately that’s a great problem to have After ten years, one of the most exciting things about the Elite 75 Frosh/Soph is that the interest in the event has never been higher, and as a result there will be more prospects to analyze and cover.
That process will begin tomorrow and last throughout the week as we’ll break down the best of what we saw, one class at a time. That means various articles, new photos, videos, and dozens of new prospects entered into our player database.
When it’s all said and done, the chatter may be about which individual players were most impressive or which particular program had the best talent, but far more important is that New England as a whole is clearly in very good shape for the foreseeable future.